PhD position in bioinformatics at the Center for Human Genetics, KULeuve

PhD position in bioinformatics, next-generation sequencing, and cancer
genomics at the Center for Human Genetics, KULeuven

The Laboratory of Computational Biology together with the
Laboratory for Molecular Pathogenesis of Leukemia have a joint position for a
motivated PhD student interested in genomics and systems biology of cancer.

Research
project
The PhD research will focus on high-throughput approaches to further
decipher the leukemia genome and to identify novel oncogenic mutations or
structural variations that may underlie tumorigenesis. Secondary interest goes
out to variations in transcriptional networks and the characterization of the
underlying cis-regulatory variations.
Available data include gene expression microarray data, GS FLX sequence
data of candidate gene sets, and may even include full genome sequence data of
multiple cancer patients.
The challenge of this project is to handle large amounts of public and
in-house genomic data and to use, benchmark, and develop state-of-the-art
bioinformatics approaches, while maintaining a clear focus on important
biological questions.

Profile
Master in Engineering, Bioinformatics, Computer Science, Bio-engineering,
or equivalent.
The candidate we are seeking should have basic programming or
bioinformatics skills, with a strong interest in high-throughput technologies
and genomics. Having any of the following skills is a plus: linux,
R/Bioconductor, Matlab, Perl, Java, MySQL, data mining, clustering,
classification, modeling, (bio)statistics, genome browsers.

Environment
The successful applicant will be hosted by the Laboratory
of Computational Biology, headed by Prof. Stein Aerts, and will be in close
collaboration with The Laboratory
for Molecular Pathogenesis of Leukemia, headed by Prof. Jan Cools.
Both labs are part of the Center for Human Genetics at the KULeuven.

Contact
Interested? Send your CV and motivation letter to stein.aerts@med.kuleuven.be